Former military police
officer Al White says he watched barrels of Agent Orange being buried at CFB
Gagetown in 1985.
It is a 33-year-old
mystery that has gnawed at retired sergeant Al White's conscience.
The now-former military
police officer told CBC News that, before sunrise on a clear morning in the
late spring of 1985, he was ordered to escort a Department of National Defence
flatbed truck along an empty road at CFB Gagetown in New Brunswick. The journey
took just minutes and ended in shadows just off the road, where an excavator
had dug a wide, fresh pit in the spongy soil.
On the flatbed were over
40 full or semi-full barrels in various conditions. Some were solid, others
were dented, rusted or in various states of decay. Almost all of them were
wrapped with an orange stripe.
"At the time, I
didn't think much of it," White told CBC News. "I just did the task
and it wasn't until some time later that it really, really hit home to
me."
Very few words were
exchanged between White, the truck driver and the operator of the excavator.
The barrels were dumped into the pit and covered over.
What Al White said he
witnessed that morning three decades back was the burial of leftover Agent
Orange, the notorious chemical defoliant linked to various types of cancer that
was used in secret spraying experiments by the U.S. at the Gagetown military
base in New Brunswick — something which would blow up into a major public
policy issue 20 years later.
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